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By Beth Demme I went to church and saw a dead finger. It wasn’t my church and, luckily, the finger wasn’t just sitting there. I was in a church in Rome confusingly called the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. We wound our way through the church to a special room with several reliquaries (containers for holy objects). One of …

By Beth Demme Have you ever decided to read the Bible in a year? How did it go? Did you start at Genesis 1:1 and work your way through to Revelation 22:21? Maybe you’ve intended to read through the Bible in a year but never quite made it. It’s February. Have you already fallen behind in your plan? I have …

By Beth Demme Plenty of people today dismiss the Old Testament as a collection of ancient writings with unknown provenance. I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think we should idolize the Bible, but there’s a lot of room between dismissal and idolatry. I fall somewhere in between, where reverence and belief intersect faith and hope. One of the reasons …

By Beth Demme You know how in the Lord’s Prayer we pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. I wonder if, for me, this is too big. I wonder if I should pray smaller. It’s not that I don’t think God can accomplish big things. This isn’t an indictment on the power …

By Beth Demme It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas / Everywhere you go / Take a look in the Five and Ten / Glistening once again / With candy canes and silver lanes aglow. When it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Advent has arrived! We could sing “it’s beginning to look a lot like Advent,” but …

By Beth Demme I don’t know if you have experienced this, but one of the places I go regularly has a terrible parking lot. The asphalt is smooth, there aren’t any potholes, the lines are freshly striped, and the size of the parking spaces is adequate. Sounds nice enough, so what’s the problem? It’s the layout. The layout is all …